Description


What colour is the future – or rather, what colors are the futures? Broad and enlightening in its coverage, this collection explores the notion that there is not just one visualization of the future, but many, stretching across and beyond shades of utopian brightness and dystopian darks. Visiting futures that belong to the realm of ghosts, it calls for a hauntology that deals not only with spectres of the past but also the of future, offering a fascinating engagement with both colonial history and hyper-accelerated societies.

Guided by a diversity of colours, contributors speculate on non-anthropogenic futurities, theorising on the richness of an essentially complex and disordered material universe. The volume's critical approaches range from speculative realism, oceanic biology, and philosophy and politics, to posthumanism and queer theory. What all these offerings have in common is a strong focus on materiality, the in|human, and the innovative possibilities that are brought into light by this 'fabulated spectrum'. They combine the potentialities of philosophy, art, and science, in that they all forge a relation to chaos, or, an undeterminable 'new.' Powerful and thought-provoking, this book illuminates different possibilities of gazing upon futures in nuanced and novel ways.

Table of Contents

01. Introduction: Spectral Futures, Bernd Herzogenrath


02. wavelength: 0.001 nm | color: gamma rays | The Spectral Affectivity of Glaciers, Julita Skotarska


03. wavelength: 100-400 nm | color: Ultraviolet | Wild Light: Radiant Skin and the Domestication of Ultraviolet Futures, Lisa Yin Han


04. wavelength: 380-750 nm | color: Rainbow | Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Claire Colebrook


05. wavelength: 400 nm-700 nm+ | color: White | White ? Rot, Amanda Boetzkes


06. wavelength: 420-700 nm | color: sodium-silver | Blank Screens and Spectral Skies: Hong Kong as a Postcolonial Locus of Transnational Asian Futures, Dawn Chan


07. wavelength: 450 nm low latency (you know, for high speed trading) | color: CME Blue (i.e. the blue that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange uses) | A Brief and Speculative History of Making the Weather an Option, Orit Halpern


08. wavelength: 451-488 nm | color: cobalt blue | Afterimage, Mitchell Akiyama


09. wavelength: 490 nm | color: supra-blue minor | Meshes of Light and Death, by Oceanic Bacteria, Jeremie Brugidou


10. wavelength: 492 nm | color: Infragreen | An Infragreen & Bipolar Tale of the Future, Thierry Bardini


11. wavelength: 530 nm | color: Pure Gold | Hyper-Vanguard: The Future of a Thousand Sects, Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh


12. wavelength: 555 nm | color: chartreuse green | Pale Green Dot, Abelardo Gil-Fournier


13. wavelength: 580 mn | color: Yellow| Specters of Solar Futurity: Yellow–Black–Yellow, Asia Bazdyrieva, Adrian Ivakhiv, & Svitlana Matviyenko


14. wavelength: 590 nm | color: Amber | Memory of a Stone, Fabien Clouette


15. wavelength: 605.34 nm | color: vermillion | Vermillion Times: Memoranda from the Future, Christine Reeh-Peters & Isabel Machado


16. wavelength: 680 nm | color: Flesh red | Excoriating Red: A Note on Russian Futurity, Andrey Logutov


17. wavelength: none, multiple | color: gray | Dead or Alive? Gray Futures, Franziska Strack


18. wavelength: 0 nm – 400 nm – = 700 nm | color: Blackless | Blackless: The Present-absence of Blackness in an African Tomorrow, Babson Ajibade


19. wavelength: 595 nm | color: Black Hole Black | Black Hole Black (Disco Ball Lightning), Alison Sperling


20. wavelength: 6000°A nm | color: transparent | The Color of Breath, the Color of Air, Bernd Herzogenrath


21. wavelength: n/a | color: Luminous Darkness | Exploring the metaphysics of Afrofuturism through Howard Thurman's Luminous Darkness, Reynaldo Anderson's & Christina Hudson


22. wavelength: n/a | color: Iridescence | The future Iridesces, Bronislaw Szerszynski


23. wavelength (Khaki) – 575.4 nm 8 wavelength (Dark Gray) – nil | Soliloquies of a Lone Diner and the Specters of Thomas Sankara, Kuti Ezebiro

Product details

Bloomsbury Academic Test
Published 11 Dec 2025
Format Ebook (PDF)
Edition 1st
Extent 336
ISBN 9781350421134
Imprint Bloomsbury Academic
Illustrations 10 bw illus
Series Futures Theory
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Bernd Herzogenrath

Bernd Herzogenrath is Professor of American litera…

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